Interview questions, puzzles, brain teasers and algorithmic tasks

I didn’t apply for a job position at
Google, but a recruiter from them contacted me. I told the recruiter
that I wasn’t interested, and that it would be extremely hard to
convince me to move away from my current job. I told them that I would
not be able to work in certain areas for a while (due to my current
position at a competitor), and that I would also demand a good
relocation package. Despite all that, the recruiter told me that they
would still be interested in a phone screening. I did the phone
screening and all their questions made sense: how to optimize certain
aspects of Google, like file transfer, etc. I was then asked to
interview at their site.

I should say that I’ve talked with 4 interviewers, and 3 of them
were nice and polite. I found a little disrespectful that one of them
invited someone to join the interview to be “trained”, but that was
acceptable. What was not acceptable was the behavior of one of the
interviewers. The interviewer asked me a few dumb questions, and I
literally decided to joke back, simply answering with enough high-level
jargon that I couldn’t be considered wrong, while not giving him any
specifics. I know several of the keywords that the guy was looking for
in my answers (inverted index, Markov model, etc.). I simply refused to
say any of the “keywords”. The interviewer wasn’t able to understand
anything without the keywords being said, and from that interview on my
interest simply wasn’t there. If what takes to succeed in a Google
interview is to memorize a lot of keyword, then I don’t want to work in
such company. Worse is that I really detected a little of the “we are
the champions” attitude, even coming from people that clearly had no
relation whatsoever with Google’s success. That is what was really
unacceptable: I know folks that really changed Computer Science
history, and are extremely approachable. And here I was, talking with
people that could be considered bystanders at Google, and one of them
behaving like if the company couldn’t survive without him.

Things then got really bad when an interviewer asked: “Why do you
want to work at Google?” You should see the surprise in his face when I
told him that I didn’t really apply for a job at Google, but given a
very good offer, I would consider working at Google. Yet, this was one
of the nice interviewers, and he had nothing to do with the moronic
behavior of the previous one. But that was the key moment: I perceived
that, when you “just talked with a moron”, some of the attitude sticks
to you. Probably I would soon be a moron if working along such people
for long. Luckily, that won’t happen.